Andrew Keen
World-renowned controversial antagonist of the digital revolution
Reclaiming our humanity
20 March 2018, 5.30pm - 6.30pm
The digital revolution has completely changed our lives; we now can broadcast instantaneously to eyeballs all over the world, and anyone can learn practically anything with the help of YouTube and online tutorials. However, this comes at a price.
Our every move in the online space is being tracked and made into profit by a handful of large organisations that are accountable to almost nobody. The cloak of (perceived) anonymity has also emboldened normally rational citizens to post vile comments on social media, causing real harm to real people in the real world.
Is our addiction now too strong that we are powerless to halt this seemingly unstoppable digital tide? This affects not only us, but also the generations that will come after.
Join Andrew Keen as he offers us an insight on how we may reclaim our humanity by adopting a strategy combining regulation, civic responsibility, consumer choice, competitive innovation, and educational solutions.
About The Speaker
Entrepreneur, author and broadcaster Andrew Keen is among the world’s best-known contemporary analysts of digital business and culture, and commentators on the digital revolution. He is the author of four books: Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo, The Internet Is Not the Answer and his latest international hit, How to Fix the Future.
He is also executive director of the Silicon Valley innovation salon FutureCast, the host of the popular Internet chat show “Keen On”, a Senior Fellow at CALinnovates, a columnist for CNN and a much-acclaimed public speaker around the world. In 2015, he was named by GQ magazine in their list of the “100 Most Connected Men”.
As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur, Keen founded Audiocafe.com and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. He has also co-founded a number of other Silicon Valley start-up ventures including afterTV and now.tv. Keen is a regular lecturer at major international conferences, speaking on the impact of new technology on 21st century business, education and society.
He was awarded a First Class Degree in History from London University, was a British Scholar at the University of Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, and earned a Masters Degree in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He has lectured at many universities around the world including Warsaw, Amsterdam, Stanford, Berkeley and Oxford.
In his sharp and witty book, The Internet is Not the Answer, Keen argues that on balance, the Internet has had a disastrous impact on all our lives. The London Sunday Times acclaimed as a “powerful, frightening read” and the Washington Post called “an enormously useful primer for those of us concerned that online life isn’t as shiny as our digital avatars would like us to believe”.